Services

March 07, 2017

Aiven Elasticsearch 5 available with easy upgrade from 2.x

We’re making Elasticsearch 5 available to all our customers today, including a simple single-click upgrade path for our existing Elasticsearch 2 users.

Improved performance and usability

Elasticsearch 5 (version 5.2.2 at the moment) and its accompanying new Kibana version (also version 5.2.2) bring many useful new features from a developer console in Kibana that you can test your queries with against the REST API to in to much improved index performance in Elasticsearch.

However, perhaps the most exciting features are the performance improvements, which range from around 25-80% faster performance, depending on the usage scenario.

You can find more about the new improvements from the Elasticsearch blog, which has a separate story about each 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2. The full release notes are also available here: 5.0, 5.1, 5.2

Easy upgrade from Elasticsearch 2.x

Upgrading your existing Aiven Elasticsearch 2 service is easy and will only take a moment.

We can see that the currently running version is 2.4.2 and there is an upgrade button beside it. Let’s press the button!

Clicking the Upgrade button in the confirmation dialog will immediately start the upgrade. Unlike most Aiven software upgrades this upgrade is performed in-place in the running service nodes, i.e. this is not the usual rolling forward upgrade that we provide. This way we were able to squeeze down the upgrade downtime to the absolute minimum required.

NOTE: After clicking the Upgrade button it is no longer possible to downgrade back to version 2.x with the chosen service. Please test your application carefully with Elasticsearch 5 before committing to the upgrade.

Confirming the upgrade pops up a banner that stays on until the upgrade is complete. Typically the upgrade takes from seconds to a couple of minutes, depending on the number of indexes in the Elasticsearch database.

Once the upgrade is complete, the yellow banner disappears and the new version number is updated in the service information:

And we are all done with just a couple of clicks!

In order to upgrade you may either create a new service or you can upgrade your current Elasticsearch cluster to the latest version.

Try the new Aiven Elasticsearch 5 for free

Remember that trying Aiven is free: you will receive US$10 worth of free credits at sign-up which you can use to try any of our service plans. The offer works for all of our services: PostgreSQL, Redis, InfluxDB, Grafana, Elasticsearch and Kafka!